I am a mechanical engineer and Six Sigma Black Belt by training, and have come to love the beautiful game in my adult life. I turned to my numerical training after becoming a Seattle Sounders FC and Arsenal supporter in 2009 in the hopes of accelerating my understanding of the new game I loved. I've been writing my own blog for over two years, and have written for such outlets as "The Tomkins Times", "The Transfer Price Index", and Howler Magazine. My goal is to advance the understanding of the English Premier League and Major League Soccer through numerical means.

E Pluribus Sounders (Part 1): Immigrant & NASL Roots

Any attempt to explain the 60+ year history of soccer in Seattle in a little over 8,000 words is bound to miss a lot. This three post series doesn’t attempt to explain the full history of the sport in the city, but rather the relationship between the sport, the city, and the club that grew out of that relationship. At the root of the story are the experiences of the individuals who built the sport and then kept it alive in its darkest days to bloom again in its current MLS franchise form. Herewith is part 1…

It’s November 2nd, 2011, and 36,000 Sounders FC supporters at Century Link Field are hoping for a miracle as their Sounders are down 3-0 to Real Salt Lake in the second leg of the MLS Western Conference semifinal playoff. I am one of those anxious bodies in the crowd, sitting just outside the Brougham End where the Emerald City Supporters, or ECS as they’re known around Seattle, chant and dance for the entirety of the match. In the 12th minute the ECS lead the crowd in singing a Woody Guthrie tune familiar to many Washingtonians:

A child standing next to me has a confused look on her face. She’s wondering why they’re singing this Depression Era song at a soccer match in 2011. A woman who appears to easily be in her 60’s turns to the child and explains, “we sing that song at the 12th minute of each match to celebrate the Sounders first MLS goal scored in the 12th minute of their first match by [Colombian] Fredy Montero.” The child’s eyes widen at hearing the name of the club’s leading scorer, almost thanking the woman for the explanation without ever saying a word.

Rewind to October 15, 2011 – Kasey Keller’s final home regular season match of his career. It is about more than recognizing the end of a 20-year career. It’s about thanking a Washingtonian who returned home after a groundbreaking European career to help build a new chapter in the long history of soccer in Seattle. More than 64,000 supporters witness the Sounders complete a 2-1 comeback victory. What seems like half the stadium stays for nearly a half hour after the match to bid farewell to the only captain they’ve ever known after experiencing the emotional release of two goals in the final ten minutes.

Rewind even further to March 11, 2010. The Sounders are hosting the first annual Community Shield Match as a preseason friendly, but it’s never a friendly when the Portland Timbers are in town. Prior to the match the ECS proudly displays banners with the scores from the lopsided rivalry with their neighbors from the south. They’re all pivotal matches – Seattle’s 2:1 win in July 2009 that kept their US Open Cup run alive, their win in the inaugural match against Portland on May 2nd, 1975, and others. Dead center in the display is a banner with the simple message the supporters hope to communicate to everyone in the stadium, but especially the Timbers’ fans:

Know Your History

The history they speak of cannot be created by a league, but is instead created by the collective experience of supporters who are committed to and maintain the concept of a soccer club. The Sounders may not be the best team in the United States and have had a history filled with various starts and stops, but they’re certainly the most loved because of what they represent: the professional culmination of a sixty year love affair Seattle has had with soccer. This love has translated to them being the most valuable soccer brand in the United States (40th in the world), mainly because of the fans who gobble up tons of Sounders-themed merchandise and fill the club’s stadium with 38,000+ fans at every league home match.

This is a story about how a soccer club in Seattle embraced its own history with the sport, and built upon that history to become one of MLS’s most successful expansion clubs both on and off the pitch.

They stoked Seattle’s modern love affair with the game by holding matches on playing fields that still sit in the city’s Woodland Park at the south end of Green Lake. The park and lake were an outgrowth of Seattle’s plan at the turn of the last century to create a number of green spaces within the city, and soon became the focus of weekly games and eventually organized soccer leagues. The complex is now surrounded by a three mile of running trail on its perimeter and ringed with a number of modern upper middle class homes, but the soccer fields at the south end of the lake remain in heavy use to this day. It was at the Woodland Park soccer fields where these immigrants’ skills would be on display every week in the 1960’s.

It was unbelievable, like a carnival. You would see the people six deep around the fields on a Sunday. To be all there, singing and having picnics. Ed Craggs, George’s dad, was the organizer and would publish the soccer news and we’d get that before the game. It had all the lineups and the scorers and the guys loved that. The people loved it.

Given the absence of professional American sports leagues in the area, such a beginning couldn’t have been much different than the scenes that played out all over Europe as association football had caught on there in the early 1900’s. The athletes at the lower Woodland Park fields were just a bunch of men who shared two things in common: they were immigrants in a new area of the world much like the new residents of industrial cities were in late-1800’s Europe, and they all shared a love for the beautiful game.

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Fantastic article! Although I’m a big supporter of the MLS Sounders, I’ve had little exposure to our club’s history. Very interesting stuff and I’m definitely looking forward to your next piece on the pre-MLS/USL years.

Nice article Zach. I run the NASL Alumni Association, and I have an archive of NASL videos on my web site: www.DaveBrett.com. I must have at least 50 NASL Sounders videos. If you want to see any of them, just let me know. My email address is on the site.

Hi, Zach. Thanks for the article. One thing I would like to point out is that Seattle’s soccer history stretches much farther back than 60 years. You did say 60+ years, but the beginning of your article seems to imply that Seattle’s soccer culture sprung up out of nowhere after WWII in the 1950′s.

The local soccer league GSSL stretches back nearly a century or more, a few decades before WWII. There is also a yearly tournament contested for the George Washington Trophy which was first awarded in 1927. Here is the GSSL page for the tournament: http://gssl.org/gwt.htm There were also local teams playing at the turn of the 20th century against other teams from around the Puget Sound, British Columbia and Oregon.

I also forgot to mention the Pacific Coast Soccer League. It is primarily a British Columbia League, but it has also featured Washington State teams throughout its history. In fact, a Seattle team was a founding member in 1908.